A Developmental Perspective on the Measurement of Cognitive Deficits in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Age-Group Differences in Set-Switching and Set-Maintenance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task

“…The finding that Shifting contributed to WCST performance is in accordance with previous studies showing that the ability to flexibly shift between tasks contributes to WCST performance (e.g., Miyake et al, 2000;Nagahama et al, 2005). The finding that Inhibition is a good predictor of the set-maintenance factor is in accordance with theories assuming that young children are more susceptible to interfer-DEVELOPMENT OF SET-SWITCHING AND SET-MAINTENANCE ON THE WCST ence from irrelevant information (e.g., Dempster, 1992;Ridderinkhof & Van der Molen, 1995; for reviews, see also Kipp, 2005;Van der Molen, 2000). Distraction errors can be regarded as an untimely reset of the contents of working memory due to an inadequate ability to refrain from processing interfering stimuli or to inhibit interfering responses (Barceló, 1999).…”

“…Finally, consistent with previous studies, performance on the stop-signal inhibition task reached young-adult levels of performance by the age of 12 (Van den Wildenberg & Williams et al, 1999). This finding is consistent with the literature assuming that the ability to inhibit develops rapidly during childhood (e.g., Dempster, 1992; for reviews see also Kipp, 2005;Van der Molen, 2000). Thus, performance analyses showed different developmental trends in the performance on Working Memory, Shifting, and Inhibition tasks.…”

“…H. Miller, 1994). That is, as children DEVELOPMENT OF SET-SWITCHING AND SET-MAINTENANCE ON THE WCST mature, inhibitory processes become more efficient, and thus, less irrelevant information enters working memory (see also Kipp, 2005;Van der Molen, 2000). Here, we hypothesized that Inhibition will contribute most in predicting set-maintenance abilities in the youngest children.…”

Relationship of Ferritin to Symptom Ratings Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Effect of Comorbidity

“…We could not evaluate age related changes in the symptomatolgy because of the cross-sectional design. This is important because ADHD is a developmental disorder and investigations with a broad age range might lead to masking of the population differences with developmental differences [25]. There were statistically significant difference of some hemoglobin between the groups, however, the clinical significance of this result is not very clear since the mean values were very close in the two groups.…”

The influence of working memory load on response inhibition in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or reading disorder

“…Future research should investigate whether the reported effects apply for each of the ADHD subtypes as it has been suggested that they may differ in the cognitive profile they exhibit (Castellanos & Tannock, 2002;Nigg, Blaskey, HuangPollock, & Rappley, 2002). It should also be mentioned that we only studied inhibition of prepotent responses, as measured by the Go/no-go paradigm, which is only one aspect of response inhibition (see Kipp, 2005). Therefore, our results only apply to the relationship between WM and this specific type of inhibition.…”